By John Menadue

 

Amnesty International has just released a report that drew attention to Ukrainian violations of International Law in its war with Russia. It quickly became a footnote in the propaganda war.

The Amnesty report said “Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, as they repelled the Russian invasion that began in February,’

“We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”

See the Amnesty Report here.

Our Western Media focus has drawn attention for months to Russian atrocities. But when there was a more balanced report by Amnesty International our media quickly buried it.  Some media that briefly mentioned the AI Report led their stories with the Ukrainian/Zelensky rebuttal.

Our White Man’s Media has consistently refused to mention the failure of the Minsk Agreement of 2014/15 which set the context for the outbreak of this terrible war. Or the numerous pledges by the US that NATO would not ‘move one inch eastwards’ toward Russia. Or that Ukraine gave extreme rightwing nationalists eight years to practise warfare on originally defence -less pro-Russian civilians in the Donbas where 14,000 were killed.

Or that a vastly greater number of Yemini people have been killed by the Saudis with the support of the US.

White Christians are much more worthy  than brown Muslims!

Truth really is the first casualty of war. We see it again in the Ukraine. Even our universities join the Zelensky propaganda campaign.

 

 

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by Michael Sainsbury

 

The appointment of a lobbyist to lead a Sydney university only emphasises the tightening grip of business on higher education. And as humanities courses are jettisoned and academics laid off work, the salaries of university chiefs have leapt into the stratosphere, writes Michael Sainsbury.

 

If there was any doubt about the undue influence that the corporate sector has played in the country’s universities it has been put to bed with the appointment of Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott as Chancellor of Western Sydney University.

Westacott will retain her role at the BCA as well as continuing her nine-year-old board tenure at former coal miner and retailer Wesfarmers. At the BCA she has pushed for lower wages and lower company taxes, and in 2014 celebrated the Abbott government’s repeal of the carbon tax which set Australia back almost a decade on climate change action and helped set up the current energy crisis.

It has been a well-worn path for blue-chip company chief executives and chair people who have been instrumental in the over-corporatisation of universities to the detriment of their academic excellence. They chase high-fee paying overseas students and strip traditional humanities courses in favour of business degrees, laying off tens of thousands of staff and casualising thousands more as well as spending countless millions on consultants.

The appointment of the head of Australia’s peak corporate lobby group to the UWS chancellorship, effectively the institution’s chair, comes only weeks after Australian National University Chancellor Julie Bishop appeared in a video spruiking mining services company MinRes (Mineral Resources Limited). The thoughts of the institution’s Nobel Prize winning Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt would be fascinating to know.

Many saw the former foreign minister’s conduct as wildly inappropriate and perhaps a conflict of interest for an institution determined to wean itself off extractive industries, and such inappropriate connections are many among the coterie of chancellors, especially the coterie with serial corporate boardroom duties.

Critical guns trained on Hutchinson

Exhibit A is Sydney University’s long-time Chancellor Belinda Hutchinson’s gig as Australian chair of global arms dealer Thales. This has long been a concern for many students, academics and alumni of the university and she was called out in a searing piece in the student newspaper Honi Soit  in September 2021.

“Putting aside the obviously murky ethics of weapons manufacturing in the first place, Thales has a distinctly mediocre moral record. In the last five years alone, it has been the subject of corruption and bribery indictments, been complicit in international humanitarian law violations in Yemen, and is the subject of a complaint to the International Criminal Court”, observed Honi Soit. The journal detailed a lengthy list of Thales misdeeds including involvement in the corruption trial of former South African president Jacob Zuma and kickbacks to disgraced Malaysian PM Najib Razak.

Hutchinson abruptly left the Telstra board in 2007 during the pitched battle between imported CEO Sol Trujillo and the Howard government, offering shareholders no explanation. In her first year as chair, 2013, Hutchinson resigned as the chair of insurer QBE’s board after it posted an unexpected $280 million annual loss, smashing its share price. She maintained that severe weather events that had hit the company were not due to climate change.

A campaign by staff at the RMIT University saw long-time chancellor – and serial board member –  Ziggy Switkowski leave due to his position as chair of Crown Resorts. Unions claimed the win although he has denied this was the reason for his exit.

A similar campaign at the University of Newcastle saw incoming chancellor Mark Vaile, former National Party leader, withdraw in June 2021, after a campus-wide outcry about his position as chair of Whitehaven Coal.

Is business taking over university leadership?

Other corporate bigwigs who have taken on chancellorships including Deakin’s John Stanhope, who approved the handing out of expensive watches to Australia Post executives, a scandal that saw the group’s chief executive Christine Holgate sacked while Stanhope kept his job.

University of Technology, Sydney chancellor Catherine Livingstone has held multiple board positions and was chair of the Business Council of Australia during her ongoing tenure. She is chairman of the Commonwealth Bank and on the board of mining services group WorleyParsons.

Some people see the university chancellor’s role as being largely ceremonial but it’s much more. The chancellor sits atop the university’s council or senate that is responsible for the employment of the vice-chancellor, the university’s chief executive. In keeping with corporate practice the salaries of Australian VC’s have leapt into the stratosphere, making them among the world’s highest paid academic managers.

At least 12 vice-chancellors received more than $1 million a year in 2021 as they all cried poor on behalf of their universities due to the pandemic and the collapse in international student numbers. This included a number of institutions outside the top 200 global rankings (only the Australian National University, Melbourne, Sydney, NSW and Monash are in the top 100). The salary of University of South Australia VC, David Lloyd, was $1.2 million in 2020 when his university was ranked a lowly 354. This is almost double that of the salary of Oxford University’s VC Louise Richardson of $637,992 in 2020.

Universities have used their outsized international student revenues – a sector often cited as Australia’s third largest export after iron ore and coal at more than $20 billion before Covid to subsidise research (not teaching) in order to boost their global rankings to attract more international students. A circle with very little virtue.

 

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BY Allan Patience

 

In recent Pearls and Irritations posts, James Guthrie, Adam Lucas and Alessandro Pelizzon have signalled the need for a Royal Commission into higher education in Australia. Their advocacy could not be timelier.

Australia’s universities today have lost their way. They’re under-resourced victims of ill-thought massification strategies and a neoliberal culture of manageriualised madness. Governments fail to see them as vital public assets and mistake students as fee-paying clients rather than investing in their education to support the county’s future prosperity and security.

In July 1988 the so-called “Dawkins Reforms” were unleashed on Australia’s higher education system. Colleges of Advanced Education and TAFEs were swallowed up by universities. Some CAEs and TAFEs became universities in their own right or were merged with similar institutions to become quasi-universities. The Dawkins Reforms transformed universities from being places for a privileged minority to mass education institutions. That in itself was a fine idea, but the policies to implement it have either been non-existent or hopelessly inept.

The result is a catastrophic mess causing serious declines in teaching and learning standards, the clumsy casualisation of much of the teaching work force, and universities being devalued by governments and the media – despite the vital role they play in society and the economy. Vice-chancellors (presidents) have become CEOs on salaries and contracts aping corporate executives, opening up a yawning cultural and workplace gap between managers and academic staff. The outcome has seen a precipitous fall in morale among academic staff and students alike.

A divisive hierarchy of universities has emerged, further entrenching socio-economic inequalities while vandalising the very “idea” of the university. Some of the amalgamated institutions are now struggling to survive. Federation University in regional Victoria for example has announced that it’s abandoning its Bachelor of Arts programs because it can’t afford them – arguably surrendering its right to be called a university at all.

The decade of reactionary politics in Australia under the Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison governments witnessed right-wing politicians treating universities with callous indifference and particularly during the Morrison era with derisive contempt. Morrison and Frydenberg locked public universities out of Job Keeper payments during the COVID lockdowns, resulting in the loss of some 40,000 so-called “casual” staffing appointments. Ministers of Education (notably Birmingham and Tudge) took it upon themselves to unilaterally cancel peer-assessed research grants.

The most negative of all the “Dawkins Reforms” was the imposition of a one-fits-all template on the Australian higher education sector. All of the “new” universities tried to copy the old prestigious universities, sometimes with farcical results. The reality of the vast diversity of interests and attributes among young adults seeking a post-secondary education was brutally ignored. Their needs and aspirations were (and are) haughtily dismissed by university managers bent on emulating the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, if not Oxford and Cambridge.

The entire sector needs to be comprehensively restructured – a painful but essential pathway out of the mess in which it now finds itself. What Australia needs in fact is a tripartite higher education system. Three separate but equal higher education sectors need to be carved out from the presently swollen and dysfunctional unitary system.

• Polytechnics (or Institutes of Technology)

These institutions are urgently needed to provide training programs at several levels, from trades apprenticeships through to high-technology research and training. Their task will be to to alleviate skills shortages while nurturing a culture of high-tech ingenuity and creativity across the country. They should award certificates, graduate diplomas and degrees in technology (the highest being the Doctor of Technology, equivalent to the PhD). Their models should be something akin to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology.

The primary focus of the polytechnics should be on what Aristotle called techne – that is, practice. Many teaching programs appropriated by universities post-Dawkins should be returned to the polytechnic sector, including engineering, building construction, architecture, IT training, nursing and para-medical training, accounting and business, hospitality training.

• Liberal Arts and Sciences Colleges

In the context of the information revolution sweeping the world, the Australian higher education system now needs a pre-university sector of colleges of liberal arts and sciences, similar to the great American colleges of liberal arts and sciences: for example Swathmore, Amherst, Wellesley. As the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has noted, the task of these colleges will necessarily entail “shaping future citizens in an age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalisation”, by providing broad liberal arts and sciences curricula preparing graduates, inter alia, for professional degrees in universities – for example, Law, Medicine, and Teaching, while also providing them with the skills and discernment for doctoral and related research programmes.

The primary focus in the colleges must be on teaching. Research, mainly, has to be the domain of the universities. The colleges must recruit brilliant teachers who have the talents to inspire and broaden students’ understandings of their worlds. Graduating from the colleges (with a BA or a BSc) should be the primary entry requirement for graduate study in a university. That means the colleges will replace most, if not all, the undergraduate degree programmes currently taught in universities. They would make them what Immanuel Kant described as the “lower (that is, foundational) faculty”.

• Down-sizing Universities

These developments would necessarily prune the size and scope of the academically byzantine mega-university structures that have come to dominate the higher education sector since Dawkins. These institutions are trying to be all things for all people, frequently failing at doing both. As the distinguished philosophical founders of the modern university John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt argued in the nineteenth century, universities must be places that, first and foremost, are committed to the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake and that are engaged principally in pure research.

In the twenty-first century, they will still need prepare graduates for the professions in what Kant referred to as the “higher (or professional) faculties”, through graduate (presumably Masters) level courses of study. However, the “higher faculties” should be seen as a subordinate adjuncts to the knowledge pursuing and pure researching functions of any university worthy of that name – not the other way round as it tends to be at present.

Clearly a Royal Commission into our universities is urgently needed, inviting submissions and hearing evidence from all stakeholders who understand that Australia must aim for nothing less than a world-class higher education system. To cling to the higher education status quo would be deeply contrary to the national interest.

Allan Patience’s book The Idea of the Public University will be published by Routledge at the end of September 2022.

 

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By Binoy Kampmark

 

With the election of a new government in Australia in May, the begging bowls were being readied by administrators in the university sector. Bloated, ungainly, ruthless and uneven in quality, the country’s universities, for the most part, had inadvertently made their case for more public funding harder.

Initially ravaged by poor investment decisions, notably in the Chinese market, COVID-19 had threatened to wipe the balance sheets of a good number of Australia’s academic institutions. Despite initial shocks, the storm has been, apart from a few institutions, weathered.

The University of Sydney registered a A$1.04 billion operating surplus between 2020 and 2021, with an underlying surplus of A$454 million. The University of New South Wales (UNSW) reported a A$306 million surplus in 2021, a considerable improvement from its A$19 million loss in 2020. The University of Technology Sydney recorded revenue amounting to A$109 million, shading their $50 million loss from 2020 into oblivion.

Such surpluses would surely suggest the viability of pay rises for staff, an important point in pay negotiations with stingy university managements. “There’s no excuse for university management to be hoarding money in such proportions,” reasons the National Tertiary Education Union branch president Nick Riemer. “People at the university are crying out for much-needed reforms. This shows they are affordable.”

NTEU New South Wales Secretary Damien Cahill has also added his view that a number of universities, notably University of Sydney, “can afford a fair pay rise for staff and to fix the problem of widespread job insecurity.”

The response from the non-teaching, non-research blotter jotters was characteristic. Such ballooning amounts were seen as unusual, one-off cases, arrows out of the blue. Around the corner, revenue stripping disasters await. The pot of gold needed protection, not distribution.

University of Sydney’s Vice Chancellor Mark Scott led the pack with that ill-worn argument. “While this is a strong result, it is also a one-off result,” he claimed in a statement. “We are not immune from the continuing uncertain future of international higher education and the growing cost pressures currently affecting the global and Australian economies.”

The University’s own annual report notes how the surplus came about “mainly due to increases in overseas student enrolments, strong investment performance and non-recurring items including the Commonwealth Government’s A$95.1 million Research Support Program contribution and the net gains from the disposal of property assets.”

The picture is one of corporate brands raking in cash rather than educators providing a public service. Some 38 of Australia’s universities, for instance, drew revenue from selling their shareholdings in IDP Education, considered one of the world’s largest international education companies. Prior to the sale, Australian universities held a 40% stake in IDP Education, retained via Education Australia.

While operating surpluses have been registered aplenty, job losses have been unremitting. Thousands of staff have been given the big heave-ho and sod off treatment even as managers have continued feathering their nests. (All in all, 3,237 fewer permanent and fixed-term contract staff positions were noted in the latest federal government figures.)

The University of NSW topped the league tables in that regard, with 726 fewer full-time equivalent positions in 2021 than the previous year. The University of Sydney shed 223 staff despite recording its best surplus in 172 years. The measure served to reduce employee-related expenses by A$60 million.

To these job losses can be added those suffered by the invaluable, long suffering casual workforce. In a shameful state of affairs, this precarious body of workers, with minimal labour protections and economic security, constitute the vast bulk of those delivering courses. Prior to the pandemic, the number of casual employees working in Australia’s universities is estimated to have been in the order of 100,000. Losses of 4,258 full-time equivalents in 2020 were registered, but other higher assessments abound.

Before this spectacle of inequity basks that species of lamentable administrator known as the Vice Chancellor. The Australian variants of this office have persistently proven to be untrustworthy and unworthy. For years, their obscene pay packages, their decisions to reduce able staff while still maintaining their own inflated salaries and the tribunate that surrounds them, deserved an anti-corruption inquiry.

The scope of such an inquiry would have to be oceanic and vast, from teasing out the grounds for ludicrous investment choices to rules stifling free speech and academic freedoms. Along the way, the habitual resort to non-disclosure agreements, the use of codes of conduct as silencing bludgeons, and the almost total absence of solid anti-whistleblower provisions, could be looked at.

Instead of being interrogated by appropriate QCs and chased up with a sharp summons, these managers only grow in number, the mold of administrative disaster, undermining academic health at every turn and creating the next absurd brand they call a “university”. With each semester, new positions are created with names disturbingly reminiscent of industrial cleaning products: DVCs, PVCs, Deputy PVCs and what not. These fatuous appointments are subsidised, in turn, by the labours of ailing, overworked staff, contemplating ruination, dejection, and suicide.

The education system has been in sharp decline in inverse proportion to the financial returns being hailed. Throwing public money at these beggars in surplus, an otherwise sensible proposition that could shield the sector from the ravages of impudent investment decisions, looks less appealing on closer inspection. Without deep, remorselessly brave reform, one that directly decapitates the officialdom of university management, good money will be thrown after ill-gotten gains.

 

 

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By Michael McKinley

 

Our universities have become the industrial brothel-keepers to the nation’s fevered national security imaginary.

At their imperfect best the Australian universities not only function as reasonably stable repositories of historical consciousness which preserve pockets of memory but also act as tribal reservations for the ethics of the truth. The academics within them should never be good company to the wielders of power and their tawdry designs. When these roles are abdicated, however, as is the case with their embrace of AUKUS, they are not credible in one of their principal roles – dominant sites of secular critique practised by people capable of living what they teach and committed to taking aim at the unequal, imperial, antidemocratic present.

Consider AUKUS: politely defined it is a wide-ranging trilateral defence – national security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the frontispiece of which is a declaration that the US and the UK will assist Australia in its acquisition of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). This is the dominant issue.

Just as accurately it is also the bastard child of an unseemly ménage à trois in which the progenitors – two remarkably corrupt governments and one in psychotic decline – have been found wanting in child support. The domestic defence imperatives of both the US and the UK are such that they cannot provide for it – the SSNs that is – from their existing resources while Australia, basically, has none in the first place. And as with all such arrangements, there is only secrecy concerning the details of the assignation.

In the excitement of it all extremely relevant prior questions were dispensed with. Foremost among these is the question as to whether Australia needs SSNs in the first place.

In the various relevant contexts – strict strategic need, cost, effective contribution to national defence, loss of sovereignty, likely developments in undersea and anti-submarine warfare, compliance with international law and treaties governing nuclear proliferation, manning, and the demands upon relevant national capabilities in general, any decision favouring SSNs (as opposed to conventionally powered submarines) there are bodies of evidence which vacate such a need.

A Defence Strategic Review which brought to its deliberations a rigorous and undiscriminating skepticism about all claims on these matters – and by definition that would appear to preclude the current reviews under way – would find this void to be disabling of its own processes.

Worse, it would recognise that its very existence reeks of intellectual indiscipline, back-to-front thinking, and profligacy with the national treasury.

Not so the universities, especially those classified as the major research universities. They see only funding opportunities. To be blunt they sense the possibilities afforded American universities – to become “relevant” to the affairs of state – which is to embrace their further evolution as part of the State-Military-Industrial-Academic-Complex.

This is volitional; indeed, enthusiastically so. It is one thing for universities to be co-opted by government in times of national emergency, but it is quite another for them to insinuate themselves into projects and programmes motivated exclusively, or mainly, by potential profit.

This includes the ANU: although the Act which established it defines one of its functions as “encouraging and providing facilities for research and postgraduate study, both generally and in relation to subjects of national importance to Australia,” nowhere does the legislation require fealty to strategies and policies that run contrary to both the good governance of Australia and the declared academic and intellectual principles upon which the ANU was founded.

AUKUS, however, manifestly obliterates whatever scruples might be stirring. Four indicative examples are to be seen in this light.

In the first, the onset of an insidious militarism/militarisation takes place even long before university but by way of preparation for it. In the name of providing “career pathways” Lockheed Martin Australia and STEM Punks, in November 2021, launched a space industry focused educational programme at Armidale Secondary College for 150 students in years 7-10.

Over the life of the programme 80 primary and secondary schools across Australia will be incorporated in to the “partnership” which has, as one of its objectives, the personnel fuel for the “proposed JP9102 solution – a next generation sovereign military satellite communication (MILSATCOM) capability for the Australian Defence Force.”

The second relates to the University of South Australia’s launch of a “Global Executive MBA in Defence and Space” – an initiative, it claims, is inspired by AUKUS and the need to “build a pipeline of talent” across its membership and other allies to service the defence and space sectors. Those interested are assured that the first cohort of students will be “hand-picked” (sic) from executives and senior managers drawn from the ADF, and defence contractors and civil servants within the AUKUS countries and other allies.

A truly broad canvas approach by Universities Australia provides the third case. In the context of its submission to the defence strategic review, it proposes opening up the internships and work opportunities which are available only to Australian citizens to the 100,000 international students from Australia’s closest strategic partners – namely from the Five Eyes and QUAD nations.

The objective, apparently, is to expand university places in “Defence-relevant courses” and so provide a “critical mass of new Defence personnel.” In essence, and hardly coincidentally, the plan is to exchange the over-reliance on the income from Chinese students with a dependence upon the Defence budget. No less is it a case of study in the addiction to acquiring external funding no matter the costs.

How much forethought, and the quality of it that was given to this proposal is an interesting question in itself: just how would foreign students contribute to the “critical mass”? In Australia, they would need security clearances – a lengthy process which, inter alia, could very well compromise them in their home countries where the authorities would be aware that the CIA, for example, has a directorate responsible for recruiting agents from foreign students studying in American universities.

What the Universities Australia proposal discloses is a mindset that values students as a tradable and fungible commodity in the most sensitive areas of government policy. To maintain the metaphor, within this mindset they are also perishable.

It is the fourth case, however, which is the leading example of AUKUS-induced corruption in the universities. Specifically, it is the ANU’s emphatic endorsement of the “integration of military, industry, government, and academia” into the AUKUS SSN project by building both a “national nuclear enterprise” and a “nuclear mindset.”

In ANU’s submission to the Defence Strategic Review, and highlighted in Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt’s address to the Submarine Institute of Australia’s conference on 9 November, the core proposal is to establish “AUKUS career pathways” which would start with “high-achieving school-age students.” Professor Schmidt warns that “decisive action” of this nature is essential for the simple reason that Australia does not have the required number of academics to meet the needs of AUKUS.

And that need is all-embracing: “not just engineers and physicists, but also lawyers, regulatory experts, specialist medical staff, naval architects and policy advisers to decision-makers.” ANU, of course, is a source recommended by Professor Schmidt, especially in nuclear physics but he clearly sees AUKUS as what strategists call a “force multiplier.”

AUKUS is to effect a transfiguration of the universities through the catalysing power of resources which will flow for decades to come from the largest defence project in Australia’s history, and along the following lines:

• Courses in strategic defence studies and national security being incorporated into STEM degrees to instill a strong understanding of the strategic drivers and applications of technical skills.
• Assigned mentors from Defence and regular exposure to Defence leadership, to establish a connection to AUKUS programs from an early stage.
• Processing security clearances for students while they are studying to enable real work experience and practical placement opportunities with Defence.
• Guaranteed placement in Defence at the conclusion of the program, bypassing existing Defence graduate programs.
• Interstate field trips and international exchanges with our US and UK partner universities to reinforce the trilateral partnership.
• Guaranteed accommodation at a university hall of residence to overcome the barriers that exist for students relocating to study.

In summary form the narrative just cited comprises the secular apologia pro vita sua of the Australian universities. Audaciously and shamelessly, it professes the need to surrender all semblance of independence and to embrace its newly defined status in a hybrid state structure.

To the extent that the various proposals are realised the university system will be further fractured. At the institutional level, management will require that the lucrative relationships with government, industry, and the military are not perturbed by untoward critical scholarship.

And alongside the general student population will be a privileged AUKUS-related elite, which will be instructed and indoctrinated rather than educated, and necessarily constrained in their academic freedoms. At the most fundamental levels they will be incompatible.

There was time in this system – at the ANU and elsewhere – when official university support for the government’s position would’ve been met with scorn and derision on the Aristotelian basis that AUKUS is best understood through an examination of the multi-layered causes of it. And these do not encourage endorsement. Indeed, it might even have suggested it commission such a project.

But that is to speak of another time – when the universities recognised the need to be self-critical and self-conscious at higher, if not ideal levels of sensitivity than now.

Now? By their own disclosures, they appear before us as industrial brothel-keepers to the nation’s fevered national security imaginary.

 

 

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BY Michael McKinley

 

Australian universities now self-identify as deeply integrated units within the agencies of the State, the Australian Defence Force, and industry. They have become part of an encompassing strategy of Sinophobia and Australian fantasies of long-range attacks on China.

When the Vice-Chancellor of the ANU recently and enthusiastically endorsed the government’s decision to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the aegis of AUKUS, and then touted his university’s present and prospective wares to be of service to the project, he was only foreshadowing the consensus of the entire university system to entangle itself, to the maximum extent possible, in the emerging state-military-industrial-multiversity complex.

As in so many of Australia’s academic pathologies, the template follows that established in the United States decades ago.

The full extent of this embrace is set out in what Universities Australia (UA) – the peak body for the country’s 39 comprehensive universities – describes as its submission to the ongoing Defence Strategy Review which grew out of AUKUS. More accurately it is a prospectus. It is a document which, in the context of specifically accepting and repeating the urgency to respond to the China-as-threat formulations in Australia-US alliance pronouncements, provides:

• a schedule of current contributions to Defence needs,
• another schedule of the ways in which the universities could be of even greater service to Defence;
• a final schedule of what government could do to help the universities assist Defence even more.

Within its three parts and 33 pages the submission explicitly proclaims the transformation of the university system from a partial, to a fully-fledged corporate entity covering students, academics, administrative staff, and relations with government and other “stakeholders” in full accord with the logic of neoliberal dogma.

It is, specifically, a document designed to encourage potential investors and clients in the “defence ecosystem” to regard the university system as theirs for the capture. It is also an invitation which is academically and intellectually offensive to the point of obscenity.

The very notion – albeit traditional – that the university-based Enlightenment project must be separated from the vicissitudes of political malice and whimsy is simply ceded without resistance, nolo contendere. And for what?

Answer: a regime which would look familiar to observers of many non-democratic societies. A well-resourced world of privileged access for students and faculty, promotion for serving the national security causes of the day, instruction substituting for education, and obedience trumping dissent.

It is a regime of voluntary academic and intellectual servitude, and, in its loss of identity and sovereignty, closely related to Defence Minister, Richard Marles’ notions of the ADF being more closely interoperable, and “interchangeable” with the US military.

Contrary to a liberal and liberating concept of the University I advanced recently on this site, the universities now self identify as deeply integrated units within the agencies of the state, the ADF, and industry; in other words with organisations whose publishing practices are incommensurable and thus known for being, in Lord Acton’s famous phrase, economical with the truth.

For confirmation look no further than the University of New South Wales’ promotion of AUKUS in November in a conference entitled, simply, “Advancing AUKUS” – an event featuring key speakers who only ever celebrate the Australia – US Alliance – such as Kim Beazley, Joe Hockey, and Andrew Hastie.

What is just as notable is the fact that the universities’ managements have been chronically complicit in a process which, outside of the opportunities afforded by the Defence Strategic Review and the AUKUS SSN, continues to mandate the defunding of public higher education, ideologically focused funding from corporations and governments, academic “labour flexibility” – which is to say increased worker insecurity, and students being defined as ‘consumers’.

By any definition these conditions are symptoms of an underlying intellectual morbidity and, almost certainly, omens of widespread civic pathologies.

Worse, there is no real debate on alternatives to orienting the university system along national security requirements. If there was, then a case could be made that, in the light of certain legitimate and appropriate national security requirements, research centres and institutions, external to the universities themselves, could be established to provide them. A case might even be made for rotating university faculty through them.

This, however, in no way justifies designated national security activities such as are included in the Universities Australia submission being allowed on university campuses.

To the extent that the universities become partners in the national security enterprises, and the windfall benefits which accrue from them, they will also become dependent, and, like the arms industries and the think tanks they subsidise, heavily invested in threat maintenance.

In blunt terms, where AUKUS and its SSNs are concerned, the universities will be integrated into an encompassing strategy that demands sinophobia, fantasies of long-range attacks on China, and the permanent failure of diplomacy beyond a relationship similar to the detente with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Somewhere, somehow, soon, the realisation that Australia is not Sparta, that the universities are not paladins, and that some things are not interchangeable should be asserted if only because the resulting pollution ultimately serves no one. From many years ago I recall the wisdom of a sign at a local swimming pool: “We do not swim in your lavatory, so please do not piss in our pool.”

 

 

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EXPLAINED: THE £1BN-PLUS DEALS BETWEEN UK UNIVERSITIES AND THE ARMS TRADE

 

What if universities supported peace and development instead of fuelling the global military industrial complex?, asks Demilitarise Education

 

JINSELLA

 

7 FEBRUARY 2023

 

When I started campaigning to kick the military and defence sector off UK university campuses in 2017, little did I know that the organisation I would go on to co-found, Demilitarise Education, would discover these partnerships are worth over £1bn.

These are lucrative relationships, with money flowing between parties in the form of academic and research partnerships and investments. But £1bn is still far below the total we eventually expect to uncover. 

What is the precise nature of these relationships, and how did the arms trade so closely enmesh itself in higher education?

In our findings so far, research partnerships account for £576m, or roughly 55% of the total figure. This is university research funded by weapons-producing companies and/or government bodies for military technology, aeronautics or other arms-related projects. 

It often involves arms companies like BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce or QinetiQ directly as ‘industry partners’. 

Accounting for £495m, or roughly 45% of the total, are monetary investments. These are made by universities either directly in arms companies themselves, or indirectly through third-party investments or fund managers like Barclays, Lloyds or BlackRock holding shares in arms companies.

A small proportion of the figure (<0.1%) comes from consultancy fees, where private arms companies pay universities for their expert input into research, development, and business operations.

A further aspect is academic partnerships which, while forming only a small proportion of the monetary value of partnerships overall, are perhaps the most visible to students. 

Academic partnerships include the development of learning and career opportunities between universities and the arms industry/defence sector, such as sponsored academic awards, careers fairs and graduate schemes.

From our research so far, the universities with the largest involvement in the arms trade are Bristol and Birmingham whose partnerships value above £50m. 

King’s College London, the University of Sheffield and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine are at around £40m, with the universities of Nottingham, Glasgow, Cambridge and University College London close behind. 

The £1bn figure is just the tip of the iceberg – with many universities refusing to be transparent. By September 2023, we will have compiled research on every university in the country. This data will drive the campaign for total demilitarisation.

Taking over universities

How did we get here? The arms trade takeover of universities can be partly explained in financial terms. In a commercialised, marketised context, universities have become increasingly driven by profit motives, by their bottom line. 

The deep pockets of the arms industry give ample opportunity for them to exploit universities for weapons research and development.

This commercialisation process has changed how universities view their role and how knowledge is produced, as university research and education activities have been turned into a market into which arms companies can bid for space. 

“These kinds of partnerships change the way that education is oriented”

Take for instance, the University of Sheffield. It launched the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) two decades ago with support from aerospace giant Boeing, with the Centre now boasting partnerships with the likes of BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce. 

Doctoral researchers and engineering students in the AMRC work on projects like using robotics to enhance the manufacturing capacities of BAE Systems – a company for which arms account for 97% of total sales. 

Or take the University of Bristol, which has partnered with the likes of Leonardo, QinetiQ and Rolls-Royce to offer a Master’s course in Aerial Robotics – essentially drone development.

These kinds of partnerships change the way that education is oriented. But they have not arisen solely through commercial, market processes, but have been spurred on by successive governments’ militarisation agendas. 

Militarisation

The UK government sees major advantage in hosting weapons-related research in universities, and historically fostered such research ties when privatising publicly-owned research laboratories. 

Government research bodies such as the Defence and Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) regularly co-sponsor research programmes backed by weapons companies and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), supporting projects with public funds to bring military technology programmes into universities.

And while these bodies are classified as non-military, they commit enormous amounts of funds and energy towards building “national defence capability”. For instance, a £4.5m EPSRC and DSTL-sponsored research project on autonomous aircraft has been undertaken in collaboration with ‘industry partners’ including BAE Systems, Thales and QinetiQ.

These commercialisation and militarisation processes have been described as the instrumentalisation of education. Arms companies and military bodies treat universities as sites to further their profit or defence motives, undermining universities’ value-free and social-benefit model of knowledge production.

 

 

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https://declassifieduk.org/explained-the-1bn-plus-deals-between-uk-universities-and-the-arms-trade/

 

 

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THE STRIKE IS STILL ON TODAY (05/04/2023)

 

The University of Sydney Branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has confirmed that they will take strike action on March 29 and 31; Wednesday and Friday of Week Six. 

The dates were announced after the decision was made by the Union’s USyd Branch Committee. Members of the branch previously voted for a 48-hour strike in Week Six, as part of a broader suite of industrial action across Semester One.

The Union’s decision to take renewed strike action comes following the failure of University of Sydney management to meet the Union’s demands. Those include maintaining the 40:40:20 model of academic work, a pay rise above inflation, the casualisation of the University’s workforce and the University adopting targets for Indigenous population parity within the University’s workforce.

The University and the NTEU are now into the 20th month of negotiations for a new Enterprise Agreement. The last Agreement expired in 2021. This means the bargaining period is now the longest in USyd’s history.

The NTEU previously took six days of strike action in 2022. Staff took further strike action in week three of this semester.

When announcing the Union’s plans for strike action in February, USyd Branch President of the NTEU, Nick Riemer, said “we’d really hoped that after 19 months of negotiations we’d be able to come to this meeting with the news that we were on the path to settlement. But since December management has doubled down on a series of what we can only describe as highly hostile positions.”

“We don’t want to strike or take other industrial action any more than we absolutely have to.

“But, our jobs, our salary, our rights at work and the nature of our institution are under attack from managers who never fail to show their disrespect for us. If we don’t fight back, those attacks will be locked in as the new normal to the detriment of every single person here.”

 

READ MORE:

https://honisoit.com/2023/03/nteu-sets-week-six-strike-dates/

 

 

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By

 Jeremy Kuzmarov

 

 

Once upon a time getting a college degree meant reading classic literature and philosophy, learning about history and politics, studying mathematics and science, learning new languages, and debating the great issues of the day in student forums.

The billionaire class and Pentagon, however, do not want young people to think critically, or to be worldly and idealistic.

They want the university to function as a breeding ground for creation of a docile, technically skilled workforce that they can control, and as a laboratory for the development of new weapons systems and testing ground for those weapons that can help them dominate the world.

Recolonizing the Campus

On April 5, Massachusetts Peace Action and the War Industries Resistance Network hosted a webinar on the militarization of higher education featuring Michael T. Klare, the national security correspondent for The Nation magazine.

Klare warned about the Pentagon’s drive to recolonize American universities and exploit academia’s expertise for the development of new weapons, including hypersonic and robotic weapons.

According to Klare, the military-industrial-academic complex first emerged during World War II and was expanded during the Cold War when the Pentagon developed a significant presence on American campuses.

Among other things, it financed academic research in nuclear physics and radar and missile technologies, and helped to develop the hydrogen bomb along with many other weapons systems that caused methodical devastation in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The political awakening of the 1960s led to large-scale student protests, which influenced many universities to sever their ties with the Pentagon, or move military-related research facilities off campus.

However, since the declaration of the War on Terror and new great-power competition with Russia and China, the Pentagon is now moving back on campus with limited pushback as the government attempts to wage an “all-society struggle” to ensure U.S. military supremacy.

Developing the Weapons of the Future

An example of the phenomenon Klare was describing is the University of Texas at Austin’s emergence as a major research hub for the U.S. Army Futures Command, whose priorities include improving navigation systems in long-range artillery, mobile communication networks, and developing the next generation of vertical lift aircraft such as helicopters and drones.

In May 2019, the University of Texas Board of Regents approved $20 million to support this collaboration, in addition to $30 million UT Austin was committing to strengthen faculty and research capabilities in areas of mutual interest with the Army.

Part of the $20 million was being used to construct a since-completed robotics research center in the Anna Hiss Gymnasium, where students and faculty members work alongside Army personnel in helping to develop cutting-edge robotic weaponry.

The Army Futures Command has another collaborative partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which houses a U.S. Army Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center that leads and integrates Army AI strategy and implementation, synchronizes key development efforts, and sets the foundations for operationalizing AI within the Army.

The U.S. Air Force has also recently entered an AI-focused research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the “Pentagon on the Charles,” whose faculty have recently been involved in the creation of insect-sized drones, and a body armor suit that would give soldiers powers straight out of a Marvel comic.

 

Under the $15 million per year agreement, known as the MIT-Air Force Accelerator, which is a component of the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, eleven airmen were picked to work in a research and development collaboration team intended to deploy practical AI solutions for “real-world, national security challenges.”

A new program at MIT also funded by this initiative aims to teach U.S. Air and Space Force personnel to understand and utilize artificial intelligence technologies.

Schools of Mass Destruction

A report produced by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) entitled “Schools of Mass Destruction” lists 50 universities that are involved in nuclear weapons production on campus.

Among them is the University of Arkansas, whose engineering department, as CAMpreviously reported, signed a collaboration agreement in 2017 with Honeywell International, which produces 85% of the non-nuclear components of nuclear bombs in the United States.

Honeywell had earlier been a target of protesters in the 1960s because of its producing lethal anti-personnel bombs that killed tens of thousands of civilians during the Indochina Wars.

The Minnesota-based company has initiated at least ten master collaboration agreements with universities since 2015 for the purpose of “facilitating closer collaboration on research and development of new technology to meet national security needs.”

Funding from the Department of Defense to higher education institutions overall has increased by more than 60% in the past 30 years.

Johns Hopkins University received $828 million in grants from the Department of Defense in 2017 alone—double the amount of any other university—including a $92 million contract with its Applied Physics Laboratory for nuclear weapons development.

Hosting a Combat Center Named After a War Monger

Texas A&M University’s RELLIS campus, located an hour outside of Austin, Texas, looks much more like a military base than a university.

In 2020, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents approved $79.3 million in university funding to create a new hypersonic weapons test center for the U.S. Army Futures Command dubbed the George H.W. Bush Combat Development Center.[1]

Named after the architect of the first Persian Gulf War which killed around 100,000 Iraqis, the center includes a kilometer-long enclosed tube used for hypersonic weapons tests, along with testing grounds for air and land combat vehicles.

The campus had already been used to test other priorities for Army Futures Command such as autonomous land vehicles. It currently features “laboratories, runways, underground and open-air ranges and a resilient network of sensors and systems for experimentation, data collection, analysis and storage,” according to a university release.

Notre Dame and Purdue University are two other universities that Klare pointed to that are involved in hypersonic missile research; both established cutting-edge wind tunnels on their campuses where hypersonic weapons can be tested.

Georgia Tech and Lockheed Martin

A second speaker at the April 5 webinar, journalist Indigo Olivier, discussed an article she wrote for In These Times about Georgia Tech and Lockheed Martin, the number one employment recruiter on campus. Lockheed houses four university laboratories that have worked on Black Hawk helicopters and the F-35 jet on its aeronautics campus in Marietta while developing a collaboration on hypersonic missile research.

Olivier wrote that, “if you’re an engineering student at Georgia Tech, Lockheed is omnipresent. You may run into Lockheed’s recruiters at career fairs or in the lobbies of the Student Success Center, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering or the College of Computing. They may be hosting a seminar on space exploration in the Clary theater…or sponsoring challenges and awarding prizes to students during ‘Engineering Week’ or hosting workshops where teams use Minecraft and Lego bricks to explore the future of digital work.”

Olivier continued:

“You’ll see Lockheed’s logo displayed on the career center’s website and job portal alongside such other corporations as ExxonMobil, Capital One and The Home Depot—just one of Lockheed’s privileges as a member of the university’s Corporate Partnership program. As an Executive Partner, Lockheed is provided with interview rooms, consultations with the school’s employer relations team, and access to an online resume book featuring current students and recent graduates. Georgia Tech also assists students with a Lockheed cover letter template. And of course, there’s Lockheed Martin Day [when] they show off flight simulations and you might give a recruiter your résumé and they might give you an interview.”

 

 

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https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/05/08/the-pentagon-has-been-recolonizing-university-campuses-why-arent-more-students-protesting/

 

 

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REVEALED: THE PENTAGON’S INFILTRATION OF AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIESThe US military and arms dealers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘educate’ Australians at our leading universities.  

by Stephanie Tran and Eve Cogan

 

“It’s indoctrination. What they’re essentially doing is peddling the prospect of war. If you want to wage a war, you want to prepare the populace and educate them to say that war is a good thing and call it ‘defence’.”  
University academic specialising in war, diplomacy, and international relations.

 

The United States Defense Department has funded $394 million to Australian universities via grants and contracts since 2007, an exclusive investigation by Declassified Australia can reveal.

Using figures obtained through an extensive examination of official US government records for grants and contracts, and Freedom of Information applications in Australia, a startling picture had emerged of the increasing involvement of the US Department of Defense in providing funding to Australian universities.

Over a 17-year period, the US Defense funding to Australian universities has jumped from $1.7 million in 2007 to $60 million annually by 2022, the year after the AUKUS agreement’s surprise announcement. The funds are backing expanded research in fields of science that enhance US military development and the US national interest.

29 of Australia’s 41 universities (70%) have received funding from the US Defense Department.

Between 2007 and 2024, the University of New South Wales received the highest amount of funding, an extraordinary $72 million. 

The University of Queensland received the second-highest amount at $60.5 million and the University of Melbourne came in a close third with $60.4 million.

Australia’s premier Group of Eight Universities (Go8) received $202.1 million between them, being 79 percent of the total funding.

 

What is the money being used for?

In many of these arrangements, the US Defense Department provided funds to major defence companies which were then used to subcontract universities for defence and intelligence-related research. 

In 2022, one of the top weapons producers in the world, the US defence contractor Raytheon, funded the University of Sydney with $105,000 for ‘Basic Research’ in the Pentagon’s Quantum Benchmarking Program. 

Raytheon produces a multitude of weapons and components, from cruise missiles to surveillance sensors to missile defence systems. Raytheon is supplying weapons to Israel in the current bloody conflict in Gaza, as well as to Saudi Arabia, which has caused the deaths of many innocent civilians in Yemen since 2016.

Similarly, weapons manufacturer Boeing’s subsidiary, HRL Laboratories, a maker of microelectronics and lasers, has entered two subcontracts with the University of Technology Sydney totalling $747,115. This funding was also for “Basic Research” under the Pentagon’s Quantum Benchmarking Program. The first subcontract was entered into in 2022, with further funding provided in 2024. 

According to the US Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA), the Quantum Benchmarking Program “will estimate the long-term utility of quantum computers by creating new benchmarks that quantitatively measure progress towards specific, transformational computational challenges.”

 

Militarisation of Australian universities 

The increase in funding from the US Defense Department to Australian universities occurred alongside the Australian Federal Government’s claims to strengthen the country’s defence. 

This upsurge began with the 2016 Defence White Paper under Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and continued with the AUKUS partnershipannounced by the Morrison government in 2021.

AUKUS has enjoyed bipartisan support, with the Albanese Labor government supporting the initiative while in opposition and adopting it once in power after May 2022.

The Turnbull government signalled greater funding to defence research in the 2016 Defence Industry Policy Statement which flagged the establishment of the Defence Innovation Hub. According to the launch document, its aim was “to increase the level of engagement between businesses, universities and the research sector to commercialise ideas.”

In April 2023, the Albanese government put their own stamp on increased funding to defence research when it announced that the $3.4 billion Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA) had replaced the Defence Innovation Hub. 

Touted as “the most significant reshaping of defence innovation in decades”, ASCA says that it provides “opportunities for Australian industry and universities to partner with Defence (…) to explore emerging and disruptive technologies, and discover and nurture innovations that will address priority capability needs.”

According to a new Times Higher Education Summit outcomes report, universities are well placed to aid the government with “strategic messaging and building social license for AUKUS”.  Indeed, university representatives describe themselves as “enablers of operationalising the strategic intent around AUKUS”, or, in other words: building social license for AUKUS.

Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist, Tanya Monro, who is responsible for overseeing and guiding the nation’s defence science research and development, stated in Washington in 2023:

“Our aim has been to align the work done in our universities and our industry. The bulk of our research and development happens in our universities, which gives us a tremendous opportunity to try to align that work to these bigger national missions”.

Monro revealed that the Albanese government’s new defence ‘accelerator’, ASCA, was modelled after and directly shaped by American intelligence agencies.

These US intelligence agencies have proliferated over recent decades and can be a bit of an alphabet soup.

“[ASCA has] quite a bit of [the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office] flavour, a lot of [US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and a sprinkling of [the US Defense Innovation Unit],“ she said.

“And I’d like to pay tribute to all my friends and colleagues in DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], SCO [the US Strategic Capabilities Office] and DIU [the US Defense Innovation Unit] for really having those rich conversations with us as we figured out how to make something like this work for Australia,” said Monro.

 

Americanisation of Australian universities 

ASCA draws from all three of these US Department of Defense agencies. ASCA works to partner with Australian universities with defence organisations , providing the opportunity for the US government and industry to funnel money into projects of interest. ASCA told Declassified Australia that it presently “does not receive any funding from any Department within the United States Government.”

DARPA, known for its innovations in national security, also has a history marked by contentious if not illegal projects, These include extensive surveillance programs and the development of lethal autonomous weapons, raising ethical and privacy concerns. Controversially, DARPA has funded research into how social media can influence social campaigners and activists.

SCO adapts existing defence systems to new uses by integrating them with advanced technologies. This includes an autonomous lethal drone swarmthat the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have duped as ‘the future weapon of mass destruction”.

DIU incorporates innovations into national security and military applications, by funding commercial ventures to make the new generation of military components and weaponry.

Another initiative similar to ASCA in accelerating Australian universities’ focus on defence is Security and Defence PLuS, an academic research and educational collaboration between three universities – Arizona State University, King’s College London, and the University of New South Wales. It aims to “advance the AUKUS agreement”.

The Security and Defence PLuS program has spurred the creation of programs such as “Cyber Security Fundamentals,” which addresses evolving cyber threats and best practices, and “Introduction to Naval Combat and Weapons Systems,” focusing on maritime warfare and technology, especially pertinent to Australia’s expanding naval capabilities​​. 

It is designed to develop AUKUS’s ‘disruptive maritime power projection’ and ‘strategy of denial’ to counter the claimed Chinese military build-up and assertions of sovereignty in the South China Sea. 

 

The most recent university defence program announced is the Digital Disruption in Defence Research Consortium (D3RC)  which involves a partnership between the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia and five universities in the United Kingdom and the United States to support the AUKUS alliance.

The D3RC is tasked with conducting commissions from government, which involve developing models of cyber influence, exploring new paradigms in defence decision-making, managing defence assets and platforms on a global scale, and innovating in designing resilient supply chains. They plan to intercommunicate with allied nations like the US and publish research quarterly. 

These fundamental changes to the funding and research base of many Australian universities warp the traditional pure research in order to feed the awesome appetite of the AUKUS industries. The changes have been described as provocative by some strategic thinkers, such as former prime minister Paul Keating, who describes AUKUS as a sign of Australia’s “commitment to the United States hegemony”.

 

The American model

Critics are raising concerns about the co-opting of universities to fulfil the government’s defence and national security interests.

Dr Binoy Kampmark is an academic at RMIT University who specialises in the institution of war, diplomacy and international relations.

“I find it deeply problematic that the education enterprise is becoming a military one,” Dr Kampmark told Declassified Australia. 

“The Australian model, until fairly recently, has been fairly separate and segregated from military activities. But now, with AUKUS, university management is essentially delighted because of the prospect of additional student places and additional degree programs specifically about submarine acquisition and nuclear technology.”

Kampmark explained that Washington is encouraging Australian universities to follow the American model, and they’re finding an open door. 

“The Americans are very familiar with the military-industrial complex and how universities are essentially a vital pillar of the defence establishment”, he said. “They’re trying to replicate that with the Australian model,” referring to research collaborations between universities, government, and defence contractors. 

“It’s indoctrination. What they’re essentially doing is peddling the prospect of war.

“If you want to wage a war, you want to prepare the populace and educate them to say that war is a good thing and call it ‘defence’.”  

According to an analyst who works within the Australian defence and national security sector who requested anonymity, ASCA mimics the American model, prioritising the aims of defence primes and government. Defence primes are large multinational defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon.  

“The Americans have used this model for a long time in the US, but this is the first time they’re using it outside the US”, he says.  

The analyst emphasised the need to accommodate the interests of defence primes in designing ASCA.

“The defence primes run the show here.”

“They drive their agenda, and they can because they’re so big and powerful. You don’t want innovation to be stifled because it conflicts with what one of the big primes wants to do.”

 

How universities and their students are responding 

With rising enrolments and decreasing funding, Australian universities have increasingly turned to the private and corporate sectors for financing, a 2022 report from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work revealed. University revenue from private sources reached record highs at 43% in 2019.

Federal funding for higher education declined by over 46% from 1995 to 2021.

In the UK, universities facing similar financial challenges have turned to defence companies for funding, raising ethical concerns over their involvement with companies that arm conflict zones, such as assistingIsrael’s onslaught against Gaza.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, all with troubling records in conflict zones, are embedded in both the Australian and British university sectors, according to a recently released report by the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade. 

In response to these financial pressures and in the wake of the announcement of the AUKUS submarine agreement, Catriona Jackson, then CEO of Universities Australia, embarked on a significant trip to Washington in April last year. Her visit aimed to meet key stakeholders to discuss potential partnerships between universities and defence organisations. 

“Universities have a major role to play in developing the capability needed to deliver the project, including through the provision of skilled workers and world-class research and development,” Jackson said. 

Belinda Hutchinson, who holds dual roles as the University of Sydney’s Chancellor and the Board Chair of defence contractor Thales Australia, has been a key figure in driving the university’s pursuit of private funding. 

Her influence was instrumental in forging a contentious Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the University of Sydney and Thales. This MoU, signed in 2017 and renewed in December 2022, formalises a collaborative relationship for joint research in high-tech weaponry and military systems, offering educational opportunities and potential career pathways for students while drawing criticism over ethical implications and potential conflicts of interest.

 

Thales Group, a French defence and technology multinational, generated over $38 billion in revenue in 2022. The company’s dealings have included supplying arms to regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which have been implicated in human rights abuses, particularly in the conflict in Yemen.

One of Thales’ notable projects, a Turkish satellite venture, has sparked concerns regarding surveillance in Turkey. The project, involving the development and deployment of advanced satellite technology, raises red flags due to the potential misuse of such technology by the Turkish government for oppressive surveillance and monitoring activities. This concern is amplified in Turkey’s complex political landscape and history of clamping down on dissent and freedom of expression.

In 2022, Thales also faced scrutiny under a corruption probe related to a submarine deal with Malaysia in 2002. Allegations that Thales and DCN International offered kickbacks to secure a contract for the sale of three submarines to Malaysia in 2002 highlight the company’s lack of transparency and practice of co-opting war for profit.

Some students and activists in Australia have begun protesting against defence sector funding, including at ANU, the University of Adelaide, UTSand the University of Sydney.

Lilli Barto is a University of Sydney alumni engaged in protests against defence companies like Thales. 

“We’re seeing the instrumentalisation of education”, Barto told Declassified Australia. “The only purpose of education is to work in an engineering firm or a weapons company rather than educate yourself or address problems in your community. Especially in science and technology disciplines.” 

The submission of the Go8 Universities to the Defence Strategic Review in 2022 highlights the enthusiasm the universities have to “work much more closely together” with the defence industry and “allies in AUKUS, the 5-Eyes, and the QUAD”.

The submission stated that partnerships with the defence industry could lead to a “solution relevant to the industry partner; a highly qualified employee who is industry ready in an area of skills need; and deeper connections between industry (…) run at a modest cost split.”

Universities Australia (UA) echoed this sentiment in their Submission to the Defence Strategic Review in 2022. 

UA’s key goals included developing programs to train personnel specifically for the defence industry, increasing the number of partnerships with industry such as defence and arms companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and diversifying funding sources to support these initiatives. This approach reflects a broader strategy to deepen academic research and education integration with Australia’s defence sector. 

Their submission also emphasised the “rapidly evolving threats in the Indo Pacific”, highlighting growing tensions with China. 

The NSW government and the ACT, Victoria, and Queensland have all banned weapons companies as primary and high school education sponsors. 

Other industries banned from sponsoring schools in those states include tobacco, alcohol and gambling products. While the primary and secondary education systems have flagged the defence industry as comparable to tobacco, alcohol and gambling, the tertiary system has yet to do the same.

 

Lack of transparency around this issue

The research collaborations between universities, government and defence contractors are often secretive, with the nature of the projects and amounts of funding remaining undisclosed.

Throughout this 14-month investigation, we encountered significant barriers to accessing information. Time and time again, our multiple FOI [Freedom of Information] requests were delayed for months and eventually refused. 

“The universities don’t have to explain the distribution of funds, they don’t have to reveal the source of the funds, and they don’t have to disclose the nature of the funding trail between the private corporations and the university, and that’s really disturbing,” said Dr Kampmark.

“Not only can you mobilise the university sector and co-opt it for the defence sector, but you also can be reassured about the system’s total opacity, its total lack of transparency and accountability, which means this information will never see the light of day.”

“People are afraid to speak up, so it’s a brilliant environment to park sensitive military projects in, when you think about it,” he said.

Greens Senator David Shoebridge expressed concerns for Australia’s growing sub-imperial defence relationship with the US and defence companies. 

“One of the few ways universities can get additional R & D funding is if they make it relevant to the arms industry…It’s all secret,” Shoebridge told Declassified Australia. 

 

How does this affect university education? 

The confluence of universities and the defence industry raises serious questions about the future of academic freedom.

“Can we still see universities as places to learn and produce knowledge that, at the risk of sounding naïve, is for the greater good of humanity, independently of transient geopolitical skirmishes?” asked Professor Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney in a recent Crikey op-ed about the impact of AUKUS on universities.

“The history of universities during the first Cold War era tells us that it is precisely at times such as this that our government and our universities need to fight tooth and nail to preserve the precarious civil society that has taken millennia to construct.”

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This extensive investigation, started in February 2023, was part of a mentorship program between Declassified Australia and these journalism students at the University of Technology in Sydney. A key aim of Declassified Australia is to assist in developing the next generation of investigative journalists.

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https://declassifiedaus.org/2024/04/18/revealed-the-pentagons-infiltration-of-australian-universities/

 

 

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